[PD] Better zoom/scaling in Vanilla?

[Christof Ressi]

Unfortunately, the "zoom level" in Pd is an integer. I don't really why, 
but I guess there must be a technical reason?

Generally, the problem is that the canvas implementation of Tcl/Tk (the 
UI toolkit used by Pd) doesn't natively support zooming/scaling, so Pd 
has to do it manually - which of course is terrible!

Any modern decent GUI framework, e.g. Qt, implements proper canvas 
zooming out of the box. In that case, the Pd core wouldn't even need to 
know about zoom levels at all, the zooming could be done solely on the 
GUI side. Personally, I have written a couple of applications with Qt 
and zooming was always trivial.

Regarding Purr Data and Pd-L2Ork: they basically use a web browser to 
display the GUI and browsers are particularly good at zooming/scaling.

So yes, it's very much possible to do it nicely - once we move away from 
Tcl/Tk :-)

Chrisotf

On 27.10.2021 16:21, Lorenzo Sutton wrote:
> Every now and then this reappears on the list... but here goes:
>
> will there be a better "zoom" in Pd? Currently working on a higher 
> resolution screen (call it HiDPI or whatever...) implies either the 2x 
> zoom which is typically too much or changing font size which typically 
> breaks existing patches, and does not increase (proportionally) the 
> relative size of IEM guis such as toggles, bangs, etc.
>
> Purr Data and Pd-L2Ork do it nicely, but it seems a bit overkill to 
> pull in all imaginable Pd libraries/externals just to have some nice 
> visuals (although being a visual dataflow language, visual clarity 
> _is_ indeed relevant), plus you are forced to curvy chords (which 
> although popular with the most) IMHO break the original Pd aesthetics :-)
>
> Ideally vanilla would have a nice zooming / scale factor functionality 
> which doesn't break patch proportions...(e.g. Ardour does it very 
> well) :-)
>
> Any tips, tricks or thoughts for this in vanilla would also be 
> interesting.
>
> Lorenzo.
>
>
>
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